Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel, Zazen, which won the 2012 PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for fiction. Her short stories appear in Tin House and Zyzzyva, and her nonfiction is found in GQ, The Atlantic, The American Reader, and Salon. She has also been, at times, a teenage runaway, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother.